A Word in Season: A Just Weight (Proverbs 11:1)

I don't know if you've ever done much in the way of baking. Perhaps you've made a cake and you've weighed out the ingredients and then you've put them into the oven, having mixed them together and a complete disaster comes out.

And it may be that you trace the problem back to the fact that your scales don't work or that the temperature on the oven is not registering accurately.

How much worse when you find not just that your equipment has failed but somebody deliberately deceived you?

What if you'd bought that flour wholesale and you'd bought a certain weight of it but when you got home you discovered that actually you have paid for more than you received?

Or perhaps you know what it's like to be engaged in some kind of trade or industry and somebody guarantees the quality of a product and you find out it's not what it's supposed to be.

Or they assure you that a contract will come in at a certain time and a certain cost and very quickly you see that both the cost and the time projections were utterly unreliable.

Well in Proverbs 11 and verse 1 the Lord says this, Dishonest scales are an abomination to the

Lord but a just weight is his delight. Dishonest scales are a false balance, a deliberate attempt to misrepresent what it is that we are doing especially here in the realm of commerce but I think it extends more widely.

It's a matter of responsibility, reliability and integrity of what you say being what you do and what you do being what you say.

It might be as simple as the timesheet that you sign that says you started work at a certain time and finished at a certain time and if you're constantly rounding up rather than accurately assessing or it may be that you've promised that you'll do something at a certain time and yet you never have any intention and you don't even have the capacity perhaps to do that but that's how you won somebody's confidence.

It might be as simple as the promise that you will actually do something but there's a deliberate attempt here to undermine.

It's something that cripples individuals and businesses when you're relying upon someone else to be honest towards you and yet they're not speaking the truth and that lack of integrity in dealing with others is something that God finds abominable.

He is the righteous one, he's the God of truth and for somebody to deliberately misrepresent reality is an offence to him but a just wait is his delight.

God loves it when there's a meeting between what we say and what we do and what we do and what we say when guarantees and promises and assertions that we make come with real confidence that this is the way things really are.

And so if we're going to be followers of a holy and a righteous and a just God absolute honesty and integrity becomes us well in all our dealings with other people and that's a good thing for us to think about at the beginning of a working week.

In terms then of what I give and what I take what

I say I'm entitled to and how I deal with others that are entitled to something from me.

Am I dealing with dishonest scales or will I deal with a just wait in which

God delights. The Lord knows my heart and the Lord knows your heart.

He knows whether or not your business dealings, your family dealings are carried out with real integrity.

Now go back to the recipe illustration. The cake came out all messed up because the the weights and the measures that had been used the registers and the scales that have been employed could not be relied upon.

Unjust weights, dishonest scales, false balances do damage to people's lives.

Not just in terms of broken down cakes and messed up cooking schemes, but in terms of people's livelihoods even.

So let's ensure if we're Christians that we are dealing with absolute honesty and integrity with those who are around us and who rely upon us so that when we say this is what it is people know that our word can be relied upon.